Month: November 2016

I am unashamedly obsessed with cartoons. Fair warning— there will likely be several more blog posts about animation in the future.

Here are five houses based on cartoons and anime that impress me:

The Up House

One of two popular structures inspired by Carl & Ellie’s home, this small yellow structure was made by the National Geographic Channel in 2011. Once finished, the house was carried by eight-foot helium balloons, mimicking the liftoff sequence from the film.

The replica of Satsuki and Mei’s house from the beloved Studio Ghibli feature was designed by Goro Miyazaki in 2005 for the World’s Fair, and can be found in Japan’s Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park in Seto.

While designed in detail, Sector V’s treehouse was never actually built. (At least, I assume it was never built— if it were, wouldn’t news have spread faster than Nurse Claiborne’s pink eye?) The layout emerged on cartoonnetwork.com’s “Ultimate Holiday Wish List” in 2003, promoting the house for one million dollars.

Good news, everyone! The Planet Express building exists in our millennium, and it’s located in Liège, Belgium. Well— not officially. In reality, the construction is part of the Cointe Observatory built by the University of Liège in the 19th century. But the similarities are striking.

If you’re a fan of Sailor Moon or Adventure Time, chances are you’ll watch and re-watch Bee & Puppycat. The animated short was created by Natasha Allegri, storyboard revisionist for Adventure Time and creator of the characters Fionna and Cake. Her artistic inspirations for Bee & Puppycat came from magical girl series like Sailor Moon and other early 90s anime.

The show stars wacky and easygoing protagonist Bee, who recently got fired from her job at the pet store. While walking home in the rain, a mysterious creature— “A cat? Maybe a dog?”— falls from the sky. After taking Puppycat home, Bee is faced with an absurdly magical and perilous task, and must decide if she is ready to accept both the responsibility of heroism and the likelihood of an unpredictable lifestyle.

A hodgepodge of genres, Bee & Puppycat features a mash-up of everyday and fantastical dilemmas: from navigating newfound adulthood to battling alongside your talking pet in Fishbowl Space. The short manages to cover both the ordinary and the overwhelmingly odd within a span of ten minutes. There’s also lasagna.

The first half of Bee & Puppycat was published on Frederator Studios’ YouTube channel, CartoonHangover, just over three years ago. Since then, each episode has gained over 1.5 million views.

Frederator Studios is responsible for popular cartoons such as The Fairly Odd Parents and Bravest Warriors. Fred Seibert, executive producer of Bee & Puppycat, expressed his enthusiasm for the show and the fact that it’s created for women, by a female writer, with strong female lead. “It’s taken me twenty years to convince anybody to make cartoons around girls,” he said in a video with YouTuber and fan Hannah Hart.

Just four months after the release of the short’s first half, Bee & Puppycat received so much positive feedback that Frederator Studios launched a Kickstarter to develop a full season.

Eccentric and delightful, Bee & Puppycat is one of the reasons why cartoons are making a comeback.